The Baltics

It's been a while since I blogged but basically, since we left Warsaw we have been to Vilnius, Stalin World, Riga and here, Rouge. Vilnius was really nice. One highlight was going to check out the constitution of Uzupis, a slightly hippy-ish neighbourhood who have (jokingly) declared a breakaway state. Their constitution includes all sorts of important, and unimportant things such as...

10.Everyone has the right to love and take care of a cat.

23.Everyone has the right to understand.

24.Everyone has the right to understand nothing.

37.Everyone has the right to have no rights.

And those are only a few.

Stalin World was cool. The Soviet playground, while not up to Canadian safety standards was tons of fun. Dad wrote about it in detail so check his blog.

From Vilnius we took a 4 hour bus to Riga, it then took two hours in the rain to find our hostel. Riga was nice, but I preferred Vilnius. Riga was too big. There were plenty of old buildings, a few churches and unfortunately, no shortage of Amber shops and stalls. We actually spent two out of three days at Jurmala, the number one beach in the Baltics. The 32 km long, fine white sand beach was one of the number one holiday destinations in the USSR. It's vintage wooden cottages are owned by rich Russians who aren't quite rich enough for frequent flights to the Caribbean.

I must admit I'm not a beach person. If I have somewhere to settle down and clean off then I'm fine but day trips are not my thing. However it was three against one so I manned up and just tried to stay in the shade.

Because our hostel kitchen was so useless, we ended up eating a lot of cheap perogies and pancakes, not that that's a problem of course. We could each get a filling bowl of perogies for about 10 dollars total, and a pancake each for desert was 4 dollars total. On our way up into Estonia we had a 6 hour wait in Valga, a town cut in half by the Latvia-Estonia border. Because of the Schengen treaty the borders since Poland have been completely open. We went from Poland to Lithuania, to Latvia, to Estonia, to Latvia, to Estonia, to Latvia and then into Estonia. We had a bit of fun.

Her is a selection of photos from Poland and the Baltics

Birkenau barracks

The road that led to the gas chambers

"Work makes free"

Stolen spectacles 

Riga old town

I think they mean "sport zone"

Palace of Culture and Science

Warsaw old town

Warsaw new town (not quite as old as the old town)

Vilnius church

Uzupis Republic main square

Stalinworld

Warsaw

Warsaw

Day 1

Warsaw is a modern city with an incredibly sad tale. The city has been sacked, burnt, conquered and destroyed so many times it is incredible that it stands today. The most notable disaster was WWII. First of all, pretty much all of the city's Jews (one third of the population at the time) were killed in concentration camps, and secondly, the city had two uprisings; both of which were brutally crushed by the Nazis. The first was the Ghetto uprising, when the Jews living in the ghetto tried to break free from Nazi brutality in the ghetto. They were quickly brought down by the Nazis and immediately sent to the camps. The second was much bigger and deadlier. With German forces throughout Poland retreating in the face of the Red Army, the Polish resistance decided to make their move and liberate their city so as to establish Polish command before the Allies and Soviets came with backup. They managed to liberate huge parts of the city but unfortunately, the Allies were too busy in Normandy and the Soviets were simply camping on the other side of the river waiting for the Nazis to crush any Polish resistance before the came and took over the city. The Warsaw Rising lasted 63 days, and between 150,000 and 200,000 (yes, two hundred thousand) Poles were killed. When the Nazis regained control of the city, Hitler ordered the city to be razed to the ground and for every inhabitant to be killed. By the end of WWII about 800,000 Varsovians had died according to the Lonely Planet guide. (Compare that with U.S.A's total military casualties of about 400,000). In all of Poland over 6 million people, (about 20 percent of the population) was killed during WWII, again according to the LPG. We will go tomorrow to the Warsaw Rising Museum where we can learn more about it.

We started our day in Warsaw at the Tourist Information inside the Palace of Culture and Science, a massive, building given to the city as a gift from Stalin. The building is the tallest in Warsaw and manages to be tall, squat, ugly, beautiful, plain and detailed all at the same time. It's quite an incredible building. We took a tram to a museum, decided not to go in because it was too much money and looked boring anyways, and then had lunch at a milk bar. We walked down a nice street called Nowy Swiat to the Old Town. The Warsaw Old Town was almost completely destroyed during WWII and was painstakingly restored in the same old stlye in the 50's and 60's. It incredible to think that these building that look a centuries old are only a few decades old. We did a bit of grocery shopping before heading home on the metro.

Auschwitz

July 5 th 2011

Just a quick note...

We were woken up at 2 am last night by a young drunk American knocking on our door. We asked him what he wanted and he replied that he was wondering whether or not we wanted to come down with him to drink some vodka and have fun. My dad answered that in fact we were all sleeping at the moment to which he replied that we could wake up. Dad said we had children with us and he said: Okay, sorry and left. To quote my sister: My parents are no fun!

July 6^th 2011

Poland

Today was a miserable day cold, grey and raining. We had planned to spend the day in Krakow but decided it was more fitting to visit Oświęcim instead. You may not recognise this Polish name but it's German name, Auschwitz, may sound more familiar. The Auschwitz concentration camp was the Nazi's largest camp, 1.6 million people, 1.1 million of them jews, were killed here during the Holocaust. The camp was divided into three areas, Auschwitz, Birkenau and Monolitz. Auschwitz was the original camp, Birkenau was the largest and where the vast majority of the killings took place and Monolitz was a camp connected to a German metalworks factory which exploited the free slave labour. Monolitz can not be visited but the first two are open for visitors. We started the day off with a visit to Birkenau. Most of the camp was destroyed by the fleeing Nazis but you still get a feeling for it's imensity, with barbed wire and watch towers stretching as far as the eye can see. Jews would come into Birkenau on cattle trains by the thousands from ghettoes across Europe. When they arrived, they would be sorted into two groups, people deemed fit for work (usually about 25 percent) on the left, and people deemed unfit for work (usually about 75 percent) on the right. The 25 percent who were fit for work would then taken to start working while all the others would be marched to the far end of the camp for "de-lousing showers". They would be shown into underground rooms where they had to get naked, and then into the gas chamber, fitted with decoy shower heads. Once the Nazis had crammed as many people as they could into the room, they would lock the doors and start pouring in Zyclon B, a deadly gas. When the victims started chocking and realised it was not a shower they would fight and crawl on top of each other, despereatly trying to find air near the light holes on the roof. 15-20 minutes later, the doors would be opened, the bodies cleared out and a new batch of people sent in for their "showers" while the old corpses were cremated. We looked around in a few of the old barracks and then walked down the tracks to the crumbling concrete ruins of the gas chambers. There was a large memorial with plenty of flowers and rocks (Perhaps the rocks are a Jewish thing because we saw them at the Jewish cemetary in Krakow as well) Past it there was a second set of gas chambers. After seeing Birkenhau we took the shuttle bus back to Auschwitz for the afternoon. The camp at Auschwitz seemed to be more of a work camp than an extermination camp. I think people would generally be worked until they could work no more, unlike at Birkenau where it felt more like it was used for mass extermination as soon as you arrived. Most of the barracks had been filled with Museum exhibits, the most interesting was definetly the one where they displayed all the clothes, shoes, hair, brushes etc., that had been stolen from people entering the camp. Some of the more eerie collections were the 7 tonnes of hair from the dead bodies (used in the German textile industry), a huge room full of thousands of shoes and another huge room full of suitcases with names and dates and sometimes places of origin. The creepiest part of the camp was the still intact gas chamber, I'm not sure whether it was a replica, re-built from the rubble or or the original tester chamber, but it was incredibly creepy being inside. After our visit I was pretty exhausted. It was a lot to take in both physically and emotionally.  

Lviv

We have been in Lviv for 2 days now. It has been raining most of the time but the city is still beautiful, however in a more central European way. Odesa had architecture like that of St Petersburg whereas Lviv is more like Krakow or Prague. All the buildings are some shade of brown or beige and quite shabby looking, but in a good way.

July 4^th 2011

We started the day off well, with potato pancakes (called blyny, known as latkas in Winnipeg) and crepes stuffed with spiced apples. This filling breakfast cost me only 17 UAH (2 dollars), for all of us we spent 73 UAH (9 dollars). We have been eating most of our meals in Lviv at this particular cafeteria mostly because it's cheap but also because it's great food and has a nice atmosphere. For supper, we all filled our bellies with a few dishes each (including perogies) then got 1 piece of cake each for dessert as well, in total it cost 120 UAH (15 dollars). Back to the point, after our meal we walked over to the hub of town Ploshcha Rynok, to visit tourist info. The lady there was really helpful and was also interested about our boat trip from Batumi because she was wondering about taking it later that summer. She told us that the tram to the cemetary which I will mention later was currently not running and that we would have to walk. The walk was shorter that expected and surprisingly nice, 2 km down a street that was mostly gardens and attractive old hospital buildings, we assumed that the medical service was not great in Ukraine and that that explained the hospitals proximity to the cemetary. The cemetery we were going to has been compared to Pere Lachaise, the famous Parisian cemetery. It was in fact a lot like Pere Lachaise, it had all the same Gothic tombstones, overgrown graves and moss covered statues as you would find in Paris. We took a walk through the grounds, the only grave we recognized was that of Ivan Franko, a nationalistic Ukrainian poet, but it was a nice walk up through the trees and graves to the top of the hill. We had planned to get a bus back to the centre but it was only 2 km, so we walked. We walked through the centre to the other side of town, to the Lvivske brewery. After a bit of head-scratching we found the entrance to the brewery museum. We wandered through looking at the brewing exhibits and then waited while Dad did some taste testing. We could not visit the actual warehouse though, we think it was because no guides spoke English, it was all a bit disappointing to be frank.

Khotyn

Our day started off with a bit of shopping at the market. There was an entire section full of nothing but various types of baby animals, they had ducklings, chicks, kittens, puppies and bunnies. Did we ever have trouble getting Mhari out of there, actually, I think Dad liked it most; he kept cuddling with the ducklings. Other than that, the best part of the market was the fact that you could get 4-inch long sausages for the equivalent of 25 cents each, (3 bucks a kilo). We stumbled out of the market and into the bus station, where a guard showed us to our bus. We were all seated beside different people as the bus left and 30 minutes later we were shown off at our stop (my Dad is better at the transport blogs). We quickly found a taxi, gave him 15 UAH (2 bucks) and were taken to what was the reason for all these buses, taxis and sausages, Khotyn fortress (-dramatic music-). The fortress is situated on a grassy, riverside location and is popular with Eastern European filmmakers. The tickets were a bit more expensive than the last fort and Mom felt ripped off having to pay 50UAH combined (6 dollars). We added up the costs and for return transport with admission and taxis the excursion cost 145 UAH (about 18 dollars) much less than a day s excursion in Turkey. We wandered around the fortress but because of ongoing renovation we couldn't explore the palaces inside. We left the fort and walked down the river bank. It was an extremely idyllic setting and we hung around for about 2 hours, eating lunch, chewing on sunflower seeds and discussing our return home (less than a month 'till England!). On our walk back up to the parking I decided that this fort was definitely more stunning than the one at Kamyanets, yet not as fun to visit because you couldn't explore as much. We got a bit lost getting back to a bus stop. We found one but were unsure about it so we ended up taking a taxi to the main bus stop, only to discover later that the bus stop we were waiting at worked just as well as the main one. Right now we are in our hostel and I think my Dad is cooking up some pasta for supper.

Kyiv to KP

Kyiv day 3

Today, we spent most of our day visiting the Lavra, the Ukrainian Orthodox equivalent of the Vatican. We The Lavra is divided into two parts, upper and lower. The Upper Lavra is home to the more amazing architecture and is a state owned museum, whereas the lower Lavra is a church owned monastary, home to a series of tunnels containing mummified monks. The gold-domed churches and cathedrals of the upper Lavra are really nice and the mummified monks are, ummm, nice as well, I guess. This afternoon we visited the Chernobyl Museum. It was really sad and interesting; it didn't provide many facts about the Nuclear Disaster but was instead very impressionistic. For example in one room there were hundreds of photos of children who were evacuated.

Kyiv day 4

I need to rush through this blog so I can start writing about Kaymanets-Podilsky but this is a quick summary of what we did. We started the day by packing up all of our stuff, we then walked down a cute old street full of souvenir shops, ate lunch at a McDonalds rip off restaurant (Mc Foxy), saw a house with tons of statues (Chimera) on it and hung around in Independence Square.

Kamyanets-Podilsky day 1

We got off the night train from Kyiv at about 6 AM to be greeted by a man from the hostel we booked. He drove us about 2 km out of town to his hostel, which exceeded expectations. We ate breakfast and slept till 10 AM, then hopped on a minibus to the town centre. Kamyanets-Podilsky is home to an old town perched on a cliff in the bend of a river, as well as a rather large fortress, these are our reasons for visiting. We wandered over a bridge and into the old town. The old town was a nice place for a stroll but the best bit was a church adorned with statues of various saints who appeared to all be dancing, it was quite hilarious. We wandered across another bridge and came face to face with the fortress. We bought 4 tickets for 36 Hryvnias (3.60 euros) and went inside. The fortress was an interesting place; there were all sorts of corridors and towers you could climb around in and it was not very busy at all. We were mobbed by strange looking dogs while eating our lunch, they were a mix between Daschund and Labrodor, not particularly scary but not particularly cute either.

Dance, Dance,Dance

KP fort

a view

another view